DIMM029: I unlisted the Optifine video
Today, I did something that I've been debating doing for a year now: I unlisted the Optifine video. While it was not technically wrong, it didn't paint an accurate picture of what was going on with MCPatcher and Optifine.
Particularly, when I was researching it, I was just so tunnel visioned on getting this video out that I didn't even think to check the licensing on MCPatcher. That is such a fucking stupid easy thing to check, but I just didn't, and there's really no way around that.
The licensing that MCPatcher uses is the MIT license, which for all intents and purposes means that anyone can use any part of the code or project for any reason and they do not have to ask for permission.
I did not know about this when I published the video, and that is so fucking embarrassing for me. Like how can I miss such a huge detail? That's what the video is about.
This changes every part of the video, because like, what is anyone complaining about anymore? A lot of the video I am looking at old forum posts and stitching together what they are saying as time goes on. They complain about how Optifine is ripping off MCPatcher, and a lot of them imply that it is illegal (though I didn't think that it was). But like, it's open source! That is like a huge deal that nobody mentioned. Even if SP was copying and pasting MCPatcher's code, (which seems unlikely) it's totally fine to do that! What the fuck is anyone talking about!?!?!?!
I've learned a lot more about licensing since then, and there's this idea about open source that it is like a pool of water that you can freely drink from, but you should try and add back more water than you take. And there is something to be said about how some devs don't do that.
But I was so blinded by the thought that I had uncovered a juicy piece of drama that I didn't think to even look at the licensing, much less make an actual real discussion about that topic.
I fucked up, and I'm sorry SP. And I'm sorry to the people around them that rely on Optifine for their income. It is 100% my fault.
I have since changed how I make videos, I consult multiple experts on the topic, I go through my script and highlight every single objective statement that I make and require a source for it before I can publish, and I'm not doing videos about drama anymore.
Drama is this leech that fills you with so much rage that you can't even see anymore, and that's not healthy if I want to relay information correctly in my videos. Especially for this topic, which is (was) the source on MCPatcher and Optifine's relationship. And it doesn't paint an accurate picture of what happened there.
What actually happened here, as far as I can tell, was that SP was moving Optifine off of needing to be installed using MCPatcher. However, he wanted to keep the features that MCPatcher already had, as to not make users confused about why their connected textures and such were missing. And since MCPatcher was open source, SP could just scoop them and add them to their own mod. Then in the age of Forge, the mods that MCPatcher added didn't ever get ported. Possibly because of Kahr's demotivation with MC at that time, possibly because SP already ported those features and he didn't feel like he needed to.
This had been weighing heavy on me, and I assume the people at Optifine, for a while, and today I decided that I needed this to be over.
The best time to unlist the Optifine video would have been directly after I published it, the 2nd best time is right now.